Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Court jesters

I'm endlessly fascinated by court reporting in the Irish Times. Although taking itself very seriously the IT is notorious for head-scratching headlines. "Dead Man Hit By Car While Crossing Road" and "Thoughtful Rapist Wore A Condom" are two that spring to mind.

But every day brings new wonders. Take today's story about a man who woke in bed and found himself being raped orally and anally at the same time. Now how the hell could that happen? What sort of a contortionist could manage that? Reminds me of the time George Michael was charged for, in effect, performing a homosexual act on his own. Anyway, if any of you can come up with an explanation of how the anal/oral rapist managed it, I'd love to know.

Then there's the guy who went slashing tires on cars, causing nearly €30,000 worth of damage, as 'a protest against capitalism'. As the baffled judge remarked, it's not at all clear how slashing tires would contribute to the downfall of capitalism. By way of explanation the perp then pointed out that he attacked only those cars registered after 2003. Well, that's ok then. Makes perfect sense.

Watching court proceedings, mentally processing them and subsequently writing a concise paragraph or two about them is not easy. I am not surprised that this skill is in the process of being lost.

Many publications - be they in the English-speaking world or in my native Germany - employ writers who are utterly innocent of analytical, structured and critical thinking. Not to mention basic grammar and spelling.

Whenever I make the mistake of picking up a newspaper, the style of writing is so chaotic that I often can't deduce from the articles who did what to whom.

Deep thinkers this new breed of writers are not, but they never lack for emotion and judgement. In fact, most of the writing seems to be done in a border-hysterical state. After all, every 20something scribbler aspires to be the next Perez Hilton and make it into the ranks of established pundits.

Think I am exaggerating? Behold this headline: "Does Cleveland Schools Have a Diversity Deficit?"This appeared the other day on Amren/the Gaston Gazette.

Even my teutonic eyes are able to discern that the writer was on the warpath against the English language.

Franz I agree about the standards of journalistic 'writing'. I guess the time when journos were trained to analyse and then present their analysis in a coherent way are long gone. Now their focus is on how to identify victim groups and shill for diversity.

What Franz said is entirely true. We live in an age where journalism is practiced (with little sign of improvement I might add) by people who have little concept of even basic grammar and readership is often by those who are incapable of reading and comprehension. It is almost like humanity started being selectively beaten with the stupid stick at birth from the 1970's.

With the advent of online news, allowing for readership input, we see imbeciles holding forth on various subjects, while the imbecilic throw in their rejoinder. Tragic.

Homer Simpson as the Cosmic Fool has nothing on Paul Hewson going onstage an attempting a Ballymun accent to pass himself off as a former resident instead of a guy who could see the seven towers from the house he lived in in Glasnevin.

Franz articulates what I've noticed myself. Reports of court cases are virtually incomprehensible. I accept that the reporters must be careful of legal issues, but Jesus, surely they can do better than this?

Multiple "assailants"?@ Franz: You probably misread Cleveland Schultz as Cleveland Schools in which case it is grammatically correct.Schultz is the inspiration for the Cleveland character in Family Guy who now has his own separate show.The real Schultz is a black separatist who is in favour of lebensraum for his race in America.

Actually "they" are more likely to say, "Allah Akbar" in the Caliphate of Yorkshire these days. The Communist plot to destroy us by simply taking over our political parties and bringing in a proxy army of Muslims and Africans is going without a hitch. Just tell the dumbed down hicks it's all for the sake of "diversity", and don't dare teach them the true history of the Crusades or they might get suspicious about treason.

I was never taught grammar at school, a Grammar school, naturally. My old school just had 3 busloads of white children attacked by gangs of Muslim men over a dispute in religious class, amazingly enough. Not a peep from the MSM or any MP.

Just in case some of you are wondering what is wrong with the sentence: "Does Cleveland Schools Have a Diversity Deficit?"

Here's the corrected version:"R C-lands schoolz 2 white?"

@ mr a: I see what you're getting at with respect to Latin instruction. To my eternal shame I had it only as an elective and dropped it after two years or so.

If I remember correctly, the very structure and rigidity of Latin has the side effect of forcing the speaker to do some thinking BEFORE beginning to ejaculate words.

Modern idioms however are more suited to just start rambling and worrying about the end of a sentence when you get there.

Which explains the rise of shows like "the view". Somehow, I can't imagine that this formalized exchange of menopausal gobbledegook could be conducted in Latin.

Maybe though, I'm doing English an injustice by writing this. After all, the language used by Wellington in his letters is hardly the same as the pidgin employed by "the view", "jersey shore" or "keeping up with the kardashians".

Maybe whatever idiom is utilized in the latter examples should be properly called "language formerly known as English" (lafokase).

Dumbing down the masses is an essential prerequisite for the Cultural Marxist takeover. What little serios stuff in education is given over to PC multi-kult propaganda. as the Jesuits said, 'give us the boy and we'll give you the man'.

“Just when you thought you knew everything about Tim Tebow, a Boston sports radio station informed us that he is probably a Nazi. The host was joking, but then so was Don Imus when he insulted Rutgers’ women’s basketball team. CBS fired him (Imus). Will it do the same when the race-based insults are directed at Tebow? Why do I get the feeling Tebow will be Denver’s starting quarterback before Fred Toettcher is out of a job?

“‘Toucher,’ as he is known to his listeners on 98.5 The Sports Hub, had this observation on Tebow’s draft-night gathering. ‘It looked like some kind of Nazi rally … so lily-white is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, Stepford Wives.’ Come to think of it, I didn’t see much diversity at the Tebow house(?). Maybe all that missionary stuff is just a cover, and his family has really spent years setting up a skinhead movement in the Philippines.

Don Imus was fired but like lesbian manhater Selena Roberts I doubt this guy will even get the slightest of reprimands.

That sentence is grammatically correct. The confusion comes from the fact "schools" is plural but "Cleveland Schools" is singular. Replace "Cleveland Schools" with any other singular noun and you'll see what I mean. For example:

@destructure: I don't agree. Who says the phrase 'Cleveland Schools' is singular? This would not be paased by any regular English grammar expert. If the intention was singular it should have been rephrased as 'Clevelan Schools District' or some such.

I understand your complaint. If the sentence were "Does Cleveland schools have a diversity deficit?" I'd agree with you. In that sentence, "Cleveland" is being used as an adjective and "schools" as a common noun.

Of course, the sentence is part of a title so all the words are capitalized. So you can't really know whether "schools" is capitalized because it's part of a proper name and singular or because it's part of the title.

But if you go to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's webpage you'll see that one of the articles is titled "CEO talks about the Cleveland Schools' financial crisis". So we know that it's common practice to use "Cleveland Schools" as a proper noun. That makes it singular.

It’s my round, declares French President -- and then leaves without paying.

“An attempt by Nicolas Sarkozy to act like a ‘man of the people’ buying drinks for his friends in a rural bar backfired horribly this week when he left without paying.

The embarrassing scene took place when the French president visited Villetelle, a small village in the country’s central Creuse region, while campaigning for re-election. Swanning up to the main bar in a cafe, he said ‘It’s my round!’ and ordered six coffees, totally 6 euros and 60 cents – the equivalent of just under £6.

Mr Sarkozy then started holding forth to his presidential team about how there was nothing better in life than enjoying a drink with your friends. As Mr Sarkozy continued to hold forth up at the bar, he boasted about how he had made life easier for rural cafes by reducing VAT to 5.5 per cent for them. He then left and, three days later, has yet to pay his bill.”

Neither, it would appear, do capitalists, clambering onto the PC bandwagon. Why do I get the impression that this ad was dreamed up by some faggotty advertising git, and the client was pretty much bullied into it.

I have a feeling he'll regret it.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/020736.html

A french ad for -- get this -- shoes.

Tiberge at Galliawatch writes:

Eram, a French shoe manufacturer, has launched a highly provocative and altogether ludicrous campaign promoting the joys of the "modern" family. This means homosexual marriage and adoption, changing partners, mixed races, undetermined genders, etcâ€¦ The whole panoply of destructive behaviors vaunted by the Left and its "progressive" allies. At first I thought Eram was parodying this type of behavior, but no, apparently it's not a parody, it's for real. And the goal is to make money. Let's hope they go broke.

Tiberge then quotes French blogger Yves Daoudal's commentary on the ads and the controversy surrounding them, including Eram's explanation for the ads:

At a time when there are more and more divorces in France, when homosexual marriage has just been legalized in New York, Eram is getting into the act and showing, both in billboards and in magazines, family portraits of a type never shown in the advertising world: unstructured, recomposed, shattered, deconstructed. Children who have two moms, others with one father, one mother, and three step mothers, still others where the step father has the same age as the older brother. Hey, this is "real" life. But if families explode, the spirit of the family remains. For, no matter what, the family is sacred.

The final straw in this particular abomination is the (obviously in vitro) kid who just happens to be a mulatto.

In fact it will be very very interesting to see how Eram sales go from now on. They remind me of the Benetton ads of a few years back. There just to shock, together with some spurious and hypocritical pseudo justification. The purpose was to make money. Period.

With Eram it doesn't make sense to me. What proportion of its demographics do these freaks make up? But then again, and savant has often posed this question, why do ads feature so many blacks when they too make up such a small (and undesirable) proportion of their customers?

With Eram it doesn't make sense to me. What proportion of its demographics do these freaks make up?

I was in the ad game, Jeremy, back at the dawn of time ... when dinosaurs ruled the earth. You'd be amazed at the amount of far-too-prosperous clients who did not give a rat's arse about advertising effectiveness and ran what one could only call vanity ad campaigns as a one-upmanship thing they could boast to their buddies (and business rivals) at schul.

One of the more experienced (and cynical) account directors I worked with stated flat out that the vast majority of advertising did not work at all ... but who cares? It comes out of taxable income.

Like the old definition of a successful military officer -- the ability to make fast decisions.

The point of the example is that Schools is capitalized which shows it's being used as part of a singular proper noun. That is a fact regardless of the rules for using apostrophes. But as far as the apostrophe's rules are concerned, they are more complicated than what you suggest.

In fact, the omission of the final s after the apostrophe does not show that "Cleveland Schools" is plural due to the following exception:

If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounce with an added sibilant, do not add an extra s.

See section 1.2.2 Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound under the Wikipedia article for "Apostrophe".

A week or two ago, I was about to enter a Woolworths store in Johannesburg (think Marks and Spencer in UK) when I saw a poster on the front window depicting one of those deviant families: White woman, Babuntu man, two mulatto kids.

Now, that's still rare, even in South Africa, so it makes no commercial sense to aim their advertising at that demographic. Obviously, therefore, their motive is not commercial, but social; that is, to normalise that kind of behaviour. And the only motive, and inevitable result, of such an objective would be the genocide of the White race.

Needless to say, I did not, nor ever will again, enter that or any other Woolworths store.

GREENWICH VILLAGE--A McDonald's cashier is caught on a horrific cell phone video using a metal rod to brutally beat two female customers who'd jumped the counter of his West 4th Street restaurant early Thursday during a fight over their order. [See the video at Huffington Post.]

The cashier, who police said had previously served a decade for manslaughter, beat the women so badly that one suffered a fractured skull and broken arm in the shocking attack, which was captured on a customer's cell phone and then posted to YouTube.

Police have charged the cashier, identified as Rayon McIntosh, 31, with felony assault charges, along with criminal possession of a weapon. Both women were charged with menacing, trespass and disorderly conduct. He is being held at the Manhattan Detention Complex on $40,000 bail, according to the Department of Correction website.

The drama began about 12:30 a.m. Thursday when the two customers--Denise Darbeau, 24, of Queens, and her pal, Rachel Edwards, 24, of Brooklyn--entered the popular fast food spot and began giving McIntosh a hard time, police sources said.

Two ho's gang up on a guy and get the surprise of their wretched lives. One of the ho's suffers a fractured skull. Do you know how hard you have to hit a nigger to fracture its skull?

Secondly, he was speaking to them in the only language they truly understand. Coming from Africa, believe me, I know.

I'll try to find a link to the video. God knows, we could all use a laugh.

Van der Merwe (the eponymous South African parody) is seen giving a wad of money to a broken, bleeding nog, lying on a Liverpool pavement (sidewalk?)

His liberal neighbor, knowing that VdM's feelings about our darker brethren are not, shall we say, enlightened, is puzzled but gratified at this unexpected act of generosity from a known racist and congratulates Van on this Samaritan act ... especially towards a black.

"Ag, no, man ..." Says Van. "It's just this is the first time I've seen a kaffir fucked up to my satisfaction."

115-year-old electric car gets same 40 miles to the charge as Chevy Volt

By Chris Bedford - The Daily Caller

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

But don’t let the car’s advanced age let you think it isn’t tough: Its present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

Don't know about you, but if I were General Motors, I'd be thoroughly embarrassed.

Presumably sucking up to the ANC government, with their trophy White wives - like Tokyo Sexwale. Might even have been his family. The Babuntu all look the same to me, and anyway I avoid seeing them as much as possible.

You can't do business in South Africa without ANC connections, a.k.a. BEE rating. The big corporations are all whores.

Educated Edsel said;savant the several odd headlines reminded pater of a couple of vintage numbers from WW2; he wonders if the readership might like them1) "Monty flies back to front" and2) "Germans push bottles up British rear"Cheers.

When you think of kpl you can get out of even a big modern diesel(or petrol for that matter)then its pretty obvious where the true advances have been in the last 40 years.

mr.a

Knowing nothing about petrochemical technology, I can make no claims but I have (on several occasions) read articles by seemingly knowledgeable people who state that natural oil creation -- deep in the earth's crust -- is not a product of millions of years, but an ongoing process that continues merrily today.

The upshot being that oil is an almost infinitely renewable -- and renewing -- resource.

This may sound crazy, but stop and consider the predictions of the last fifty or more years that "We have five more years of oil left ... and then nothing." Rather like the quaint predictions from the sixties and seventies of "A new Ice Age by 1997.

UN - the same thought often struck me. WE've been told for decades now that the world is running out of oil, all major fields have been discovered etc. but as you say, we keep on discovering more of the damn stuff.

And yes, I DO remember in the seventies we were headed for a new Ice Age. Whatever happened to that?

.And yes, I DO remember in the seventies we were headed for a new Ice Age. Whatever happened to that?

It went the way of "Global Warming", Savant.

The big buzzword (buzzphrase?) for quite a while now has been Anthropogenic Climate Change or ACC.

Global Warming is so ... so ... last decade ... and also, to be frank, so embarrassing when the proponents get their willies caught in the gears by making statements Like: "One of the most deceptive things about Global Warming is that mean temperatures can actually drop."

Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the primary factor contributing to the warming of the Earth’s surface over the past half-century.

However, for the past few years global temperatures have been stagnant or slightly decreasing even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been increasing faster than ever. This situation has led some voices in the media and blogging world to challenge the relationship between the CO2 concentrations and warming. These critiques are flawed, however, as short-term changes in global temperature are driven by numerous factors going beyond CO2, and the recent disconnect between the two is not particularly unusual in light of their past relationship ...

Oil does NOT take millions of years to create, no matter if you believe in abiotic oil or the generally accepted catagenic process (which takes heat and pressure). Oil has been found in sediments as young as 1,000 years old, and can be created by industrial processes and in the laboratory in only hours. The only part of the process that takes millions of years is the accumulation and burial that precedes the formation of oil from organic remains of plankton.